Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?

>
I'm afraid it is.

=(

If so... we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even universities
turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new brilliant services
in todays world. =(

>
Perhaps the crowd that's brilliant is a minority that hasn't changed
much compared the previous times.  (Perhaps it has.)  Just because a lot
of people are joining university and coming out of them pretty clueless,
it doesn't mean that we've reduced that small group that carries the
rest of the world on their shoulders.  Perhaps this group is still the
same percent compared to the last centuries.  (Just guessing hypotheses
here.)

That would be a comforting thought! Maybe the nr of brilliant people stays at
the same percentage!
In my experience, the brilliant guys hardly need a teacher. All I do is to feed
them problems when they get bored. Then they go away, work at it 24/7 until they
solve it, and come back for more. When I teach, and have to keep it at a level
that is appropriate for the average level, they get bored and space out.
So I give them the lecture slides and material to read at their leisure and keep
feeding them problems. Occasionally they get stuck, but very rarely, and then I
zoom in.
Those students give me immense joy!

But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we
have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially
in an area such as computer science.  I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense.  I'm sure there are
declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the
worst.  When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast
majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.

When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind, to learn new
things, to develop yourself. My home was full of books, we watched
documentaries, went to museums. When the computer arrived, I was fascinated with
linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young today were to
waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing computer games. It feels
they would just waste their lives that way instead of exploring it and
challenging their limits, and breaking through their limits.